Yeah, but because it's patented, the companies who are now able to gouge us for more money will have to pass on that extra income onto that well-known humanitarian charity - Amazon; and I'm sure nobody objects to donating to such a good cause. They do so much good for the world - they're world leaders in patents, don't you know?

But think of the Economy!All hail the Economy. Listen to your lobbyists. Listen to your advertisement. Buy, but don't complain. There is no other Economy than the one and only Economy. There is no alternative. All hail the Economy.

LOL, people wonder why the crisis does not end. The answer is right there. Because more and more people are leeching off the few people who actually produce something tangible.

It's true that they are anti-free market. But no sociological construct can be pure. The patent system could work if the government or businesses had any interest in it working properly. But they don't. What we have no allows them to manipulate the market, drive out upstart companies, and drive up prices. Amazon takes more of the profit from digital books than real ones. Figure that one out for me.

The 'free market' is not a real entity, its a social construct, and it can only exist where property rights are defined and defended - by government force. ALL property, patents or land, is created in this way. Its called enclosure (or inclosure, as it was spelt when this first happened to land in England.

What is going on here is entirely consisted with the 'free' market (quotes because I refuse to pass on the propagandistic notion that markets have anything to do with freedom) - it is in fact what has been going on since the very dawn of capitalism. You secure exclusive access to something by force (generally via a government, which markets cannot exist without) and then you sell it back to the people you have denied it to.

Of course the free market is a social construct. No one claims it is an entity. But it doesn't require government force for the protection of property rights and God help us if government gets to define property rights. Individuals can defend their property rights without government force.

I can easily lock my car to keep valuables inside it safe without the government's involvement. And the government is completely powerless to stop someone from smashing the window to get in and take my valuables.

You are a fool. OF COURSE the government defines property rights. If there is a dispute about who owns something, it goes through a court, rather than through a shootout. A world in which property rights are defined by individuals is a world where how much you have is a function of how much violence you are willing inflict on those around you. Mad Max basically.

"logical principles that govern reality"? That is meaningless. Logic is a process of inference, and its ability to correctly derive principles depends solely on the assumptions it begins withs. Economics and politics are invented by humans, and have nothing to do with the principles that govern reality (i.e. physics) - the notion that does is an attempt to bolster a particular social model via a naturalistic fallacy.

I assume that the post you replied to is referring to the practice of colluding to maintain the artificial scarcity of some product, and not the patent itself. It's either that or assuming that the poster was completely drunk.

You are absolutely right, of course, but capitalism and the free market have proven time and again that they cannot survive without some government intervention. The patent system was created with another, more noble, intent: to encourage innovation by rewarding an inventor a small and exclusive window to market something new and ingenious. Like many other well-intended pieces of legislation (disability pay, welfare, and lawsuits, for instance), the number of abusers of the system has grown disproportiona

But if the big companies were also not able to patent it, there would still be a niche market for independent and/or handmade versions of the product or things based on the idea.

For example, I sell handmade crafts; knitted, crocheted, and sewn stuff, and things made from polymer clay. Despite the fact that those can be (and are) mass produced by the big guys, there is still a niche market for handmade stuff. I don't make as much money as the big guys - because I can't make as much product as them - but

But a small company won't be able to enforce it's patents anyway. They'd have to spend years in courts suing the big companies that 'steal' their patents and at the same time fight against all the counter-suits for the thousands held by the bigger company they'd be accused of violating.

Patents are virtually useless to a small company that wants to actually make a product - any product can likely be found to infringe hundreds of patents. They are only useful for big companies that can use them as deterrent,

We made it unlawful to sell other humans into slavery for moral, religious and social reasons

No, actually, we handed the government a monopoly on slavery and indentured servitude. The 13th amendment:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Considering the overwhelming nature of the web of law as it stands today... it's pretty easy to find you

You have a choice: do your business somewhere else. That's part of the "free market" you talk about. The freedom to do business with whoever you choose. Nobody is forcing you to buy with Amazon. Just "vote with your wallet". You are part of the free market too.

Correction: they don't have exclusive rights over anything you thinkyou may need. You obviously have absolutely no clue about the volume of Amazon IP and even less idea about the needs of others and likely not even of yours as well.

You cannot compare a poor person from a first-world country with someone from a non-first-world country because their living expenses are not the same. You would not be able to live with $3,608 a year in the USA but in India it's the per capita purchasing power parity (PPP), in US dollars.

Interestingly, there was the case of the homeless guy in NY, I think, where a police officer bought him boots because he was living on the street with no shoes. Turned out he had an apartment and hid the shoes rather than wear them. So yeah, some people prefer to live in a freezing park. Granted, that may often be because they're mentally ill.

As someone who sells software online from home as a part-time business, I use artificial scarcity (a product registration keying system) to motivate consumers to pay. The best way for them to get screwed would be for me to remove all incentives for them to pay, which would remove all incentives for me to be in business at all. Then, they'd get nothing - for free.

Imagine a world in which you had to pay for new cars but you couldn't resell the car after you used it. At that point, you'd really feel screwed

Terminator was far too optimistic in portraying our future as the War Against the Machines, a nice and clean them-versus-us scenario in which the machines would be non-human. The enemy would be easy to identify.

The reality is likely to be rather more ugly and messy. It'll be a War Against the Corporations, and unfortunately they are us. It will be man against man, those who care about their fellow humans versus those who perceive their only duty is to be a cog in their corporate machine, and society be damned.

It's all a bit bleak, and every day seems to carry us closer to that nightmare instead of towards a post-scarcity civilized future.

Terminator was far too optimistic in portraying our future as the War Against the Machines, a nice and clean them-versus-us scenario in which the machines would be non-human. The enemy would be easy to identify.

I take it noone ever explained to you that "patents" and "free markets" are NOT that same thing?

On the contrary... I've read Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and all the usual stuff and drank the Kool Aid for most of a decade... and I've come to decide it's a bad fiction. I know a lot about what makes a free market, I just don't think it works or is something we'd want.

For all the hypothetical benefit of patents, they are a government interference in free markets.

Ok. WTF. I've been seeing that phrase for years now, and I *still* can't quite figure it out.

Where can I get this free beer? Because apparently, for some reason, my area doesn't have a source. I've looked and looked, and beer, even really lousy beer, just isn't available for free. Not even if you make it at home... you still have to come up with the ingredients. And bottles.

Would someone take a moment to explain this strange turn of phrase to an old dude?

The problem with digital media is too cheap to produce. So the idea of supply in essence goes to infinity (or at least such a high number that it doesn't matter anymore) So using good old Supply and Demand the price of all digital media goes down to 0, no matter what the demand is, or the elasticity of supply and demand.

Free stuff that is good right? Well perhaps in the short term, but in the long term it creates the problem that it isn't free to create the information. It takes time and talent for writer to write a story good enough to be well liked and published. Software takes man hours of people with skill sets. Music takes talented people who need to dedicate good portions of their life for to their art...

My career is in writing software, I get paid to offer my services to an organization. The organization is willing to pay for my services as long as it deans my cost to be equal or less then the value I provide them. If I am producing stuff of little or no value due to a saturated market where anything I write already has a free version of it, and what ever I write must be offered for free too, means my value is 0, thus my bargaining costs will be 0 too (AKA I will not get paid for my work, or have no work).

If out of work, I will need to change my profession to a skill that has a lower supply and a higher demand. That means giving up skills that I am good at and go to something else. Now enough people do this we loose quality digital media and we get "Fan Fiction" quality stuff where if we are lucky we may get a good product every once in a while, but most of it will be complete garbage, or just rehashing what already exists with little innovation or new ideas.

Now here comes the Alternative Open Source business models and touting the profit of such companies such as Red Hat and IBM.... Sure Consulting services, and special distribution and configuration and training services are still in effect for some software. But that really works when you have something of a decent complexity. Now a lot of innovative stuff is too easy to use to be Consulting on. RMS who made money selling Tapes of Emacs. Well those tapes cost money to buy, and he had limited resources to create such tapes and mail them out, allowing supply and demand, as they didn't have the internet widely available at a fast enough speed, making media distribution obsolete.

There is greed, and there is being valuable and compensated for your value. If amazon flooded the market, there will be less authors willing to make digital media and will go back to printed, just because they can make more money off of printed books, even if they sell less. As with all things in life there is a balance, Greed is the case where the balance is broken. But most people who are not greedy do want more out of their lives.

Now enough people do this we loose quality digital media and we get "Fan Fiction" quality stuff where if we are lucky we may get a good product every once in a while, but most of it will be complete garbage, or just rehashing what already exists with little innovation or new ideas.

While this might have been true in the past, in the last few years the amount of high quality fan fiction has increased exponentially. Fan fiction authors aren't accountable to market research or thematically restricted to whatever will attract the most paying customers, and thus can do the craziest stuff in their work. It's come to a point where I find "normal" fiction predictable, repetitive and mostly boring, while fan fiction is consistently creative.

The owner of the property has exclusive rights to it backup up by government

Private property is the core of "free enterprise"

The birth of industrial capitalism was formed by the "privatization" of traditional agricultural commons, impoverishing the peasant class and creating a cheap workforce for the factories of free enterprise.

The privatization of innovation eliminates the intellectual commons in a similar way

Which planet's history did you study? Because it sure as hell wasn't this one's. With a few tiny marginal exceptions, there has never been an 'agricultural commons'. Farm land throughout the ancient and medieval world was always owned by somebody, whether it was quasi-state aristocracy, wealthy oligarchs, or more modest private farmers (the lattermost being rather rare actually before the modern capitalist world you disparage). Frequently land was awarded to soldiers (*privately* not collectively) after campaigns, Rome was famous for doing this, though it was by no means the only civilization to exercise the practice. Of course the next time those soldiers were deployed, they frequently came home to find their land had been 'reassigned' which underscores the dangers of the state. (Jefferson rightly said that any state powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have.)

I could give you a whole lecture on feudalism and how the ages of exploration and enlightenment laid the political theoretical foundations for the sea change in civic life enabled by the industrial revolution. You really need to study history in depth and realize how oppressed humanity was before the development of capitalism created a middle class society to counterbalance previous aristocratic/oligarchic power structures. Power structures that recreate themselves whenever an anti-capitalist ideology seizes control of society, since redistribution of wealth by force crucifies the middle class and puts the bulk of society under the boot of a politically empowered few.

All this being said, any kind of intellectual property law is a farce against the nature of any truly free market because it violates real property rights. It essentially posits that I cannot use my materials to make things I want to make because somebody else "owns" the "idea" of using materials that way. No government should be able to tell somebody that they cannot make things with their own property, or configure their property in some way that another lays claim to. Either you own something (physically!) and have control over its disposition or you don't. The whole concept of "intellectual property" should be excised from society.

With a few tiny marginal exceptions, there has never been an 'agricultural commons'....I could give you a whole lecture on feudalism and how the ages of exploration and enlightenment laid the political theoretical foundations for the sea change in civic life enabled by the industrial revolution.

You better not, because you're not qualified to do so.

"Originally in medieval England the common was an integral part of the manor, and was thus legally part of the estate in land owned by the lord of the manor, but over which certain classes of manorial tenants and others held certain rights. By extension, the term "commons" has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to. "

I'm not sure that any rebuttal by me could have matched your pithiness, my good anonymous sir.

Commons were indeed set up by the titleholders of fiefs as part of the *logistics* of managing inter-serf relations within said fief. To start waxing romantic about their public nature or "rights" (which were primarily vs. other serfs) is to be obtuse to their origin and intent and indeed to buy the metaphorical bill of goods that the the fief lords were selling.

In his defense, there are plenty of instances across the world where while land was practically owned - i.e., it was obviously used by someone, and their use made anyone else's use of it difficult if not impossible - there was no legal documentation of ownership. Mexico explicitly ran into this issue in the mid 19th century, Germany had plenty of this in the middle ages, and Russia was the poster child of "you only own what you can defend". In short, the middle ages had plenty of declarations of ownership,

Private ownership of huge swaths of land was so common in the ancient Roman world that they came up with a word for them: latifundium [wikipedia.org]. Remnants and impressions of these units survive up until this day.

Private landholding is basically as old as civilization itself, there is written evidence from the period that it was common in Mesopotamia and all the cultures that sprang from it. In Mycenaean society virtually all land is held by the nobility and the serfs are so disenfranchised as to be explicitly called

Huh. I thought the livestock were the ones doing the grazing. Of course, if the cattlemen's heads are down there cropping grass, I probably wouldn't have noticed them, so there you go. Slashdot: Where you can learn something new!

You're making the mistake that a lot of modern Capitalist political/economic rubbish relies on: assuming that the words used to describe economic organization (in this case, "owned by"), have a universal and absolute meaning identical with their present usage.

Yes, land just about everywhere has historically been "owned" by someone. But "ownership" is a particular bundle of de jure and de facto practices that changes with time and place --- for large segments of history, land being "owned" by some lord/king was not at all exclusive with use as "commons." Only later was the definition and practical exercise of "ownership" shifted towards our contemporary notion of "private property." But I suppose paying historical attention to the actual conditions of production "on the ground," instead of tossing around terms like "ownership" as though they were handed down immutable from God, would be too "Marxist" for you.

All this being said, any kind of intellectual property law is a farce against the nature of any truly free market because it violates real property rights. It essentially posits that I cannot use my materials to make things I want to make because somebody else "owns" the "idea" of using materials that way. No government should be able to tell somebody that they cannot make things with their own property, or configure their property in some way that another lays claim to. Either you own something (physically

The first phrase is the definition of fascism. I do not mean of course the Hitler and Mussolini regimes, I mean the concept of citizen reduced to components of the State.

Private property exists before governments do, so it is not a monopoly granted by the government.Government themselves, with the systems of laws came after some people acquired power and need to legitimize it. That's why even in democratic countries it it so difficult for the will of the majority to end up in structural changes.

In order to maintain a consistent position, you've switch from libertarianism/minarchism (a little nutty) to anarcho-capitalism (abso-fucking-lutely insane).

If government does not back up property claims with the threat of force, individuals must do so themselves. Congratulations, you've just handed all land over to whoever has the physical power to conquer it. Exclusive rights are only possible in this world by having a massive superiority of arms over all your neighbors - which of course means that they d

Interesting discussion. The issue of land and natural resources is one of my few gripes with anarcho-capitalism. If there was a perpetual "frontier" with water and arable land, I think it would work. With land being scarce however, you free yourself from the tyranny of the state, but could end up as a multi-generational slave of the local land baron.

I think some sort of merger between the philosophy of Henry George (see "Progress and Poverty") and the philosophy of anarcho-capitalism would be ideal. Geo

Congratulations, you've just handed all land over to whoever has the physical power to conquer it.

How is not that way now? Why do nations keep standing armies? Because if you don't have the physical power to keep it, then someone with the physical power to conquer it, will. Civilization depends on someone with the biggest stick enforcing the rules.

There is a world of difference between 1) A person enforcing their own property claim themselves, and everyone else doing likewise and 2) a democratic government, maintaining a monopoly on force, arbitrating property claims. The latter might not be perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than the Mad Max world that results from the former.

Congratulations, you've just handed all land over to whoever has the physical power to conquer it.

In the US, in most cases, your land can be taken by the courts for any number of reasons. It can be taken if the government wants to build a road, or, in many states, if a corporation has a plan for your land that will earn more taxes than you are presently coughing up for the same parcel, or parcel plus its neighbors. So while you might think of the government as "backing" your property ownership, there are a

I thought that the government was, by definition, the group who has the biggest gun, for as long as that state lasts. So there is no in between.

Life in the state of nature is ugly, nasty, brutish and short, and we all live in a state of nature at all times. All aspects of the social contract are our attempt to collectively minimize our risks and maximize our advantages and benefits, generally by ganging up on would-be bullies or out-group folks. Historically, this has been a lot easier to accomplish with memetic support structures like the illusion of human rights, religious duties and obligations, the fear of a supernatural deity with the biggest gun that one could ever conceive of (but one that is only used after you are dead), and government bureaucracy. Traditions, too.

In the end, patent rights and copy rights are what "we" say they are, collectively, and can enforce by the direct threat of and delivery of violence on members of the herd that disagree. "We" generally establish these illusory rights according to some mushy but reasonable principles such as rewarding the inventor and/or author (so that they will continue to produce inventions and stories and so on -- it is in our own self-interest to keep them motivated). However, a much smaller set of "we" also benefit tremendously from the delivery systems for the inventions, books, music, art and so on created by the talented few but enjoyed by the greedy many. Those delivery systems have long since been co-opted as the true basis for patent and copyright law, more the latter than the former. Patents at least have a reasonable lifetime, but a copyright now is damn near forever, long past the actual lifetime of an author.

The corporate interests of the world would, I'm certain, like to turn patents and copyrights into property forever, with no time out. That way they become pure commodities that can be bought and sold indefinitely. Imagine a world where the rights to Shakespeare's plays were still for sale, traded like pork bellies or mattresses. Imagine a world where you have to pay somebody every time you read, see, or hear one of Shakespeare's plays, where even media copies are sold per use, not as things you can own. That's the ideal of the publishing industry, with the ideal of the manufacturing sector and drug industry regarding patents close behind.

This leaves the problem of enforcement, the big guns. Any law that is ignored as universally as the copyright laws are currently ignored is no law. They are unenforceable, and everybody hates them. The illusion that they are somehow necessary in order to reward the actual creators of IP, carefully fostered by the media industry, is finally breaking down as well. At some point in the evolution of the digital Universe we will probably find some way of directly rewarding the authors of books, creators of music, inventors of fabulous machines only but in a way that strips away the guarantee of huge profits for the (largely unnecessary) middlemen. But to get there, we have to pry congress away from the clutches of the large, wealthy, and loud lobbying groups that advocate for the protection of their "rights" to charge the moral equivalent of a toll for going down a public road.

I have an Amazon account and a Nexus with Kindle reader. They go together good. I buy the odd book here or there, between a few books of varying prices. A fair exchange for a fair price. This kind of stuff really annoys me though. It is as if they wanted to annoy people to go the root of firing up a browser and typing "latest best seller torrent" and side loading it.

I admit I have sideloaded a lot of stuff, but mainly stuff that is useful, but in PDF (i.e. tech docs).

Ultimately, a few people will put up with it, but when you are part of a group of "digitally intelligent" people, they will just rip and share their stuff, either through online or large removable media.

I have a Kindle Touch and have bought a few books from Amazon. Once downloaded I copy them to my PC and strip the DRM out of it with some freeware apps, then convert them to ePub. That way, if Amazon ever decide that I'm no longer eligible to give them my money (as they have with others) I lose nothing, and can use them on any eReader in the future. I'm happy to root my phone, I can do it with the Kindle if need be.

The phrase “maintain scarcity” has the same feel as "monatize" to me - it indicates a world view where commerce is the be all and end all of existance.

"Maintaining scarcity" is in essence the exact reason our copyright laws on this planet are so messed up - the notion that something that is no longer commercially viable might still be of historical or cultural interest is heresy. In fact, availability of "assets" without requiring payment from users of those assets is an active attack on capitalism and our way of life, according to some people.

I know what kind of world I want to live in, and it isn't one where the goal is to "monatize" art, culture, history and literature to line our pockets. Maybe, just maybe, those things have a value that transends price tags - maybe intellectual stimulation, artistic enjoyment, and knowledge have their own intrinsic worth that doesn't rest soly on whether people have paid to acquire them.

Although I think this is a sleezy smelling move on Amazon's part, it's more properly seen as a reflection of our broader culture. What kind of world do we want to live in?

... by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. Sounds like they're doing exactly what the Goddamn Constitution says.

What, by creating artificial scarcity to jack up consumer prices? The Constitution was designed to support price-gouging?

Uh, yeah? It says it right there. What do you think "exclusive rights" are used for except excluding others and/or selling licenses?

I have no problem with protecting the work of people, and if you invent something new you should be able to benefit from it without someone just ripping it off.

But a patent to manipulate the economy to make sure that prices stay high solely to protect corporate profits? How does society benefit from that.

Ah, so you want the USPTO to qualitatively classify each patent as being "good for society"? So, for example, if a teetotaler is in charge of the office, no patents on new distillery technology. Or if a luddite is in charge, no patents on anything related to computers. Or if it's one of those anti-gun, anti-video game folks, then no patents on anything related to firearms or ga

For tech books, I have been buying a lot from O'Reilly [oreilly.com] recently; they have fully DRM-free ebooks and half off sales about every month or so. It takes a little more time to get them to my Kindle (you have to email them to a special Kindle address or sideload them directly) but it's worth it.

You will sell countless millions of your products at under a buck each. At >$10 each, a significant number of people will pirate it. And if you don't even offer it for sale (or play tricks to have a limited number of copies available), you guarantee everyone who wants it will just pirate it.

Don't like it? Starve in the gutter. We don't care. Give us what we want or vanish, simple as that.

Frankly if authors made more as a % (thus more absolute dollars), we might see more people go into this field of work.

If the authors made more as a percent, a lot more people (including myself) would feel willing to pay more for their work. When the lion's share goes to an obsolete publishing and distribution industry that has zero relevance to digital works? No thanks, but can you direct me to the author's online tip jar?

Crazy, it seems Amazon, Google, Apple are having no trouble finding customers.

At under a buck for a book it will be the writers who will starve in a gutter unless their work sells millions.

Ever seen people buy from a used bookstore, where they can get physical books for a buck or two? They walk out of those places with crates full of books.

Yes, at a buck a book, writers will need to sell more. But they will sell more, as people load their Kindles with cheaply purchased books rather than a dump of Project Gutenberg and one or two best sellers.

This has to do more with the fact that physical objects wear out and digital objects don't. Publishers have complained that when a library lends a physical book, it can only do so for a limited number of times before it has to buy another copy because the first wore out. When libraries lend digital objects, they never have to buy another again. So publishers want a limit to the number of times that a digital object can be lent before requiring a repurchase. The same goes for CDs/DVDs.

People still need time to read a book (or listen to music), which limits the number of people that will read the book even if the ownership can be transferred indefinitely. However, we have effectively perpetual copyright at the moment and it just wouldn't be fair to the starving writers' grand-grand-grandchildren if the market for the book would eventually dry up because there are a sufficient number of copies sold such that every person who wants to read it can get a second hand copy.

This isn't about libraries lending out devices with digital items on them. What's being talked about is the system where a patron goes to the library web site, logs in using their library card number, and downloads the digital files they "check out". It is then marked as checked out in the system - despite the fact that if it weren't, other patrons could download the same file just the same. The downloaded file has DRM that causes it to stop opening after the check out period (there are several ways around

Once George Carlin commented that to him, "bipartisan" meant "larger than usual deception". A keyword for me is "broad" just before "patent". I have trouble thinking of any invention worthy of that since, say, the transistor.

The patent office needs to adopt a simple fact: doing something digitally that has been done physically before (like lending purchased objects just like a used book and music store, or having a digital "shopping cart" like, you know, a shopping cart) is "obvious". Someone will eventually get around to implementing it, so it is not novel and should not be patentable. At best maybe the site should get design patent coverage, or some very specific encryption algorithms should be protected in some way if in fact they are proprietary, but the idea of patenting an entire store concept should be ridiculous.

In the late 90s, Circuit City tried to push an "innovative" new kind of DVD player that played regular DVDs and special DIVX [wikipedia.org] (Digital Video Express) discs (more discussion of the format here [dvdjournal.com]), that were basically DVDs you bought for $4 that could only be watched for 48 hours after the initial viewing. After that, you would have to pay for the privilege of additional viewings. The player had a modem and would phone home to the service for authorization to allow you to watch the disc you bought.

Since DVDs and CDs are digital goods and you have been able to lend, rent and purchased used ones for years, how can this now be patented? The only difference is that this covers digital goods that aren't on physical media, but then software, another digital good, has been distributed electronically for decades if you include mainframes. There was even a big case with Revelon, where a developer "removed" software from their mainframe because they failed to pay -- all done digitally. So, can somebody expla

How is this not just meaning no redundancy for the "same" digital object. Rather than host 1000 copies of the same file, Amazon minimizes redundancy and every cloud user who hosts the same file has access to the same block(s) of data.

Single merchandiser (Amazon) == market control. Don't sell digital goods on Amazon and don't buy or make DRM. Amazon Google and Apple lose their power to unilaterally make up law and Reality when we stop giving them that power.

It's DAMN more than that. Every form of DRM is a way to make a digital "object" have a false form of scarcity.

Corporate suits can't get it through their fat heads: the digital world has different rules. Build your business based on those rules. You can't have the same type of scarcity as a physical item. Every attempt fails and will continue to fail.

Create great content
Make that content super easy to buy
Release the content worldwide on the same day
Give it a fair price
Make sure it works on any device

Absolutely... here's a list of what I buy vs what I pirate and why:

Music: Pirate: Not easy enough to get the music I want; often at a price point I don't wish to pay; often comes with other music I don't want bundled. This is slowly changing though, so I'm keeping an eye on online music purchasing options and will happily start buying if the situation improves.
Television: Pirate: I'm a native English speaker and live in a country where English television isn't generally broadcast. Some shows are sold as